Germany-based Luxx Studios has opened a new section on its website dedicated to showing the tools developed in-house, including stand-alone, Nuke and 3DS Max tools. They are also releasing one of their tools for free, a script for creating animation previews with motion blur using Nitrous. More will be coming more in the near future, including videos of their pipeline, task, converter, database and messaging tools. More on Luxx Studios' website.

Spanish photographer José María Mellado has written a book with tips and techniques on producing quality panoramic photos and overcoming common issues. More on the author's website and Amazon. (Spanish)

Pixar announced the availability of v3.0 beta of its set of open source libraries that implement high-performance subdivision surface evaluation on CPU and GPU architectures. This latest version brings profound changes to the core algorithms, providing among other features significant performance gains. Also of note, the developers have disclosed the roadmap for future 3.x releases. More on the OpenSubdiv project's page.